I attended tonight's Staten Island Yankees game, in which they faced off against the Aberdeen IronBirds(Baltimore's NYPL affiliate). The big lefty Nik Turley got the start for the Yankees; he was drafted in the 50th round of the 2008 draft and received a well-above slot signing bonus of $125,000.

Before going on with my notes for the game, I just want to put out a disclaimer that I am in no way any type of scout. What you're going to see here is my opinion, which is probably meaningless, so don't put too much stock into it.

• I was very unimpressed with Turley. His fastball was around 88-91and his stuff just didn't seem above average or anything. His command was also pretty poor. He walked six batters in four innings, and it seemed like 3 or 4 of those walks came on just four pitches. He did strike out four batters, though. He's only 20 years old, and is a 6'7" lefty, so I wouldn't give up on him yet.

Despite Andrew Brackman's high ERA(5.10) to start the season in Tampa, it was clear that he had improved and his promotion to Trenton after pitching just 60 innings for Tampa showed that the Yankees agreed. However, that impressive start has not fully transferred over since Brackman's promotion. Now, don't get me wrong, Brackman has been good all season long. I just don't think his performance for Trenton matches up that well to what he was doing early in the season for Tampa.

Now, this is nothing new. Most pitchers don't immediately do as well when they're promoted to another level, and the jump from High-A to Double-A is a tough one. But, on the surface, it may seem like Brackman has maintained his dominant performance all season long.

His ERA has dropped from 5.10 to 3.53 and his FIP has risen from 3.33 to just 3.65. His strikeout rate has remained constant since being promoted to Double-A, which is always an encouraging sign. The big difference has been in Brackman's walk rate.

It would have been naive to think that he could have sustained that minuscule 3.5 percent rate, but seeing the number increase by nearly 275 percent is not what I had hoped for. His groundball rate has also dropped, but I'm not concerned with that. If he's keeping that number at 50 percent or higher, he'll be fine as he continues to climb the ladder. If his K:BB rate stays at just 2.19, I would not be surprised to see him struggle.

I'm not sure how many more innings the Yankees will have Brackman throw this season; last year, if you include his stint in Hawaii, he pitched 119.1 innings. He has passed that, I wouldn't expect the Yankees to push him too hard this season.

I've heard some people suggest that he finish out the year with the Scranton bullpen to get a little experience in Triple-A. I don't think that this would be the right course of action. Brackman is already 24-years-old, but I don't think the Yankees need to be that aggressive with him. He can start next season in Trenton, and if he turns it up a notch, the Yankees can quickly promote him to Scranton. I don't think there's any rush to get him there right now, though.

Picture courtesy of MLB.com/Julie Jacobson

After watching Vazquez pitch terribly at home again, I got curious and took a look at the starting pitching home/away splits for this year. It’s pretty illuminating:

There’s definitely some interesting stuff in here.

-First off, Sabathia has been great everywhere and has actually pitched better at home. He does have a home BABIP of .252 but has also struck out more and walked less in the Bronx.

-Similarly, Burnett has been bad everywhere. He’s been victimized by the HR more so at home then on the road, but also has more strikeouts and less walks at home.

Pettitte, Hughes and Vazquez though have all struggled pitching in Yankee Stadium.

-Pettitte has been plagued by the HR at home which is somewhat surprising since he neutralizes lefties so well (2.27 FIP against LH vs 4.72 against RH) and Yankee Stadium is a good park for lefties to go deep in.

-Hughes has been helped out by an extremely low HR/9 on the road which is definitely a little fluky. xFIP, which treats HR/FB rate as a part of luck, reflects this in his 3.92 road xFIP. His K/9 and BB/9 splits are not as dramatic- the difference is less than a batter per 9 for strike outs as well as walks.

Finally, we come to the mess that is Vazquez. The number that unavoidably jumps out is the 2.20 HR/9 rate at home- a number that doesn’t even include today’s fiasco. Some of that number is surely fluky- however he’s been nearly as bad on the road, allowing 1.78 HR/9. Now Vazquez has always been an interesting statistical study, mainly because he has a higher than normal career HR/FB rate then one would expect. Stats that normalize HR/FB rate such as xFIP and tERA have accordingly always rated him better (3.72 career xFIP and 4.20 tERA compared to a career 3.89 FIP and 4.22 ERA). Because of that, I’m not sure how much faith you can have in his 4.73 home xFIP compared to his 6.03 home FIP. The answer is probably somewhere in between.

What makes analyzing Vazquez this year so hard is his deteriorating stuff. It seems like he’s fallen off a cliff and it’s hard to draw conclusions about what ultimately is the cause of that. I’m not sure the whole answer lies in the statistics.

What is clear though is the Yankees have an interesting problem. Vazquez, Hughes and Pettitte have all pitched markedly worse at home then on the road. Hughes has probably gotten a bit lucky on the road and that may account for some of the difference. Some of these numbers could be the product of a small sample size as well. However Pettitte has almost identical homerun home/road splits last year -1.27 at home, 0.57 on the road.

Honestly, I’m not sure what the full answer is. What is clear though is that outside of Sabathia, the Yankees starters have had a troubling propensity to give up the long ball in the Bronx.

Josh Norris has confirmed that both Dellin Betances and Manny Banuelos have been promoted to Double-A Trenton. He goes on to speculate that DJ Mitchell is out of the rotation, which makes sense given these two promotions. Here's how the Trenton rotation stacks up right now:

Yeah, that's probably the best rotation in the minors.

It's pretty impressive that all five of these guys have seriously raised their stock over the course of the 2010 season. They all started in Tampa and are having great seasons. I give each of these pitchers a ton of credit, but I can't help but think some should go to Nardi Contreras. Whatever he is doing with the Yanks' pitching prospects, he needs to keep it up.

Recently, as I'm sure many of you know, Granderson changed his swing. He went to Kevin Long earlier in August, and spent two days working with Long on some adjustments to make his swing simpler. So far the results have been excellent; Granderson looks like a different player. Today I would like examine his new swing using pitch f/x data.

I wanted to see what the benefits of his new swing were. More plate coverage perhaps?

In order to do this, I must first visualize his old swing:

This is the run value, by location, of all pitches thrown to Curtis before the series in Kansas City. I have only shown pitches that were in the strikezone. Blue is bad for Granderson (negative run value). The yellow is slightly good for Granderson, and anything approaching red is good.

It looks like Granderson handled pitches down and in pretty well, but not so much everywhere else.

If we break down his run values by vertical location, we get:

I guess before the swing change he was a "low-ball" hitter, relatively anyway. He fared poorly everywhere.

If we break down his run values by horizontal location, we get:

Oddly, Granderson performed worst on pitches down the middle. I would have guessed that he struggled the most against pitches that were on the outer-third, but I suppose it's likely that he takes a lot of those pitches, minimizing their negative value. Granderson is a very heavy pull hitter (courtesy of FG):

For this reason, it was pretty predictable that he performed the best on pitches on the inner third of the plate. This was also the only positive run value of any of his location splits. These numbers also show how shockingly horrible Grandeson has been when hitting the ball to the opposite field. He has been so bad that the formula of wRC+ breaks down into the negatives!

more after the break: